Saburo Kurusu

Saburo Kurusu (6 March 1886-7 April 1954) was Japan's ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1939 to November 1941 and the special envoy to the United States from November to December 1941. He is best-known for signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy on 27 September 1940 and for negotiating peace and understanding with America while Hideki Tojo secretly prepared for war.

Biography
Saburo Kurusu was born on 6 March 1886 in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. He graduated from Tokyo Commercial College in 1909 and entered the diplomatic service a year later, and he worked with the consul in Chicago, Illinois in the United States from 1914 to 1920. He married Alice Jay Little, a local woman, and their two daughters married American men. Unfortunately, their son died in an accident in 1945. In 1930, he was sent to Peru, and he egotiated an end to anti-Japanese sentiment there, calling on Japanese immigrants to settle in the rural highlands instead of Lima.

In 1939, he was promoted to ambassador to Nazi Germany, and he signed the Tripartite Pact alliance with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, bringing Japan into World War II as a member of the Axis Powers. On 15 November 1941, he was sent to the United States to negotiate peace and understanding with the American government as tensions rose between the two countries, but his efforts were in vain, as Hideki Tojo was secretly planning a war against the USA at the same time. From December 1941 to June 1942, he was interned in Hot Springs, Virginia until the US and Japan exchanged captured diplomatic personnel, and Kurusu maintained that he was unaware of Tojo's plans. He died in 1954.